@article{rabinovich-etal-2018-native,
    title = "Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice",
    author = "Rabinovich, Ella  and
      Tsvetkov, Yulia  and
      Wintner, Shuly",
    editor = "Lee, Lillian  and
      Johnson, Mark  and
      Toutanova, Kristina  and
      Roark, Brian",
    journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "6",
    year = "2018",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/Q18-1024/",
    doi = "10.1162/tacl_a_00024",
    pages = "329--342",
    abstract = "We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We quantitatively analyze non-native lexical choice, highlighting cognate facilitation as one of the important phenomena shaping the language of non-native speakers."
}